Video: Cloning, flipping, and combining shapes

I've saved my progress as Subtracted shapes.psd, found inside the 27_pen_tool folder. In this exercise, we're going to take care of this little problem right here. That's not a screen redraw issue, that's a problem with what I've done. It's my fault. I've got this rectangle riding too high, this central rectangle that's filling out the light bulb. We also need to take this rectangle and circle, which are currently being subtracted from the rest of the shapes, and we need to duplicate them and flip them over to the right-hand side. So, for starters, I'm going to grab this big shape, and I have as selected my Black Arrow tool, and then I'm going to press Ctrl+T or Cmd+T once again, and I'm just going to drag down from this top handle.

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Cloning, flipping, and combining shapes

I've saved my progress as Subtracted shapes.psd, found inside the27_pen_tool folder.In this exercise, we're going to take care of this little problem right here.That's not a screen redraw issue,that's a problem with what I've done. It's my fault.I've got this rectangle riding too high, this central rectangle that'sfilling out the light bulb.We also need to take this rectangle and circle, which are currently beingsubtracted from the rest of the shapes, and we need to duplicate them and flipthem over to the right-hand side.So, for starters, I'm going to grab this big shape, and I have as selected myBlack Arrow tool, and then I'm going to press Ctrl+T or Cmd+T once again,and I'm just going to drag down from this top handle.

This time we don't need to set a transformation origin, because we want to scalewith respect to the opposite side of the shape, that is, the bottom of the shape.So, that happens automatically for us.I'll drag down to about there, and that looks like a pretty good match.All right, now I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to completethat transformation.I will then, I'll click on the rotated rectangle, and I'll Shift+Click on thebig old circle there, and next, I'm going to press Ctrl+T or Cmd+T onceagain, big surprise there, and I need to grab my transformation origin, whereis it, out here, and I'm going to move it to what I believe to be the center of the light bulb.

All right, now I'll right-click anywhere inside the Image window and I'll choosethe Flip Horizontal command.That'll go ahead and flip my shapes over there, but I made a mistake, I justflipped the original shapes, I meant to flip a clone.So, I'll go ahead and press the Esc key.What I meant to do is not press Ctrl +T. I meant to press Ctrl+Alt+T orCmd+Option+T on the Mac, because having the Alt or Option key down allows usto work on copies of these shapes.All right, now I'll drag this transformation origin to a different location,because, obviously, last time when I saw my mistake, I was also too far over to the right.

So let's try cheating this origin point over to the left a little bit, I'llright-click once again, choose Flip Horizontal, and that flips those shapesalmost exactly into the right position.They do require a little bit of adjustment.So, I'm using my Right Arrow key in order to move that circle over to where it needs to be.So, I'm trying to match the location of the circle, I will come back to therectangle in a moment.All right, now I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in order tocomplete my transformation, and I just press the Enter key one too many times,or the Return key on the Mac, it could have been.

What that does, just in case this ever happens to you, because I would imagineit might have by now,when you press the Enter key or the Return key and you don't have anything goingon, that is, you're not accepting a transformation, however, you are working insideof a path outline and you have any of your vector tools selected, that's goingto deactivate that path outline.So, what you need to do is press the Enter key yet again or the Return key yetagain on the Mac, in order to reactivate that path outline.So, the Enter key is a toggle for deactivate and reactivate.

Again, that's the Return key on the Mac.The reason I was groaning just a moment ago when I started telling you thattale, because actually that's a very useful bit of knowledge, is that we areonce again experiencing screen redraw problems.Just know that this area here is actually subtracted.The only entity that's not aware of that at the moment is Photoshop. That's okay.We'll make it aware shortly, if it doesn't wake up here.All right, what we need to do is take this rectangle and rotate it outwardfurther, because the side of the glass apparently isn't altogethersymmetrical, or more likely actually, I believe this love handle down heredoesn't come out far enough.

Whatever may be the case, we need to take this edge out.I'm going to do that by clicking on the rectangle once again in order to select it.Then I'll press Ctrl+T or Cmd+ T on the Mac in order to enter theFree Transform Mode.I will move this transformation origin down to the lower-left corner, like so.Thank you Photoshop!Now, you're aware of what's going on, that's nice.Better late than never!Anyway, and then, oops!In my sassiness I did the wrong thing.I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z on the Mac.

I didn't move my cursor far enough out, so it still thinks I'm inside of therectangle area, because there is a big upright bounding box going on here.All right, let me see if I can scroll to a point where I can see what I'm doing,and then I will drag outside of the transformation boundary in order to createthis edge right here.Then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac, and laugh in mymerry way as I notice that Photoshop is not updating the redraw once again.So, if I zoom out far enough that Photoshop will finally figure things out and it did,thank you very much Photoshop.

But when we zoom back in, we are faced with the unpleasant fact that it cannotkeep up with the changes, but there is a way to force it, I just need to make acouple more transformations first.Notice this edge comes out fartherthan I'm giving a credit for, in other words, it comes out into this area here,and I think it might - well, you know what, we can fix that later, never mind.All right, let's take care of the screen redraw problem.How do we address the fact that Photoshop is not giving us our edge back here,and we want to see it?Well, click on one of the other shapes like this big circle, for example, righthere, click on it, and go ahead and cut it by going to the Edit menu andchoosing the Cut command or pressing Ctrl+X, Cmd+X on the Mac.

This is also how you adjust stacking order where your paths are concerned, whois on top and who's behind, that kind of thing.Now, if I go up to the Edit menu and I choose the Paste command or press Ctrl+V,Cmd+V on the Mac, those of you who have any experience with Illustrator whatsoever, may be familiar with the Paste In Front command, which matches thelocation of the path and puts it in front of all the other shapes.Well, when you're working with path outlines inside of Photoshop, the Pastecommand is Paste In Front.It matches the location like so, and it puts it in front of the other paths.

Because we took a shape out and then put it back in, we force Photoshop tocompletely reevaluate the path outline, and it updated the screen redraw as well.All right, that was tough, but we managed to make it work, and actually it'slooking pretty darn fine as you can see here.Now, from here on out, we're going to be drawing a bunch of ellipses down hereat the base in the metallic area of the light bulb, and we're going to befilling out this bottom area as well.We're going to be adding a bunch of smaller shapes this time around, mostlyellipses as you'll see.

But it might help us to go ahead and just sort of resolve the path outlines, sothat we don't have so many of them floating all over the place.We're going to do that using this Combine button.But before you do, what I recommend is that you set aside your primitives, andyour primitives are your shapes that made up the bigger, better path outline,your individual rectangles and ellipses.The way to back them up is to go to the Paths panel, where you'll see atemporary path outline.This is your vector mask, just as you see the pixel-based layer mask inside theChannels panel, you see the vector mask here inside the Paths panel.

So, go ahead and grab it, and then drag it onto the little Page icon to duplicate it.Now you have a permanent path that's just sitting here in the Paths panel andyou can come back to it anytime you want.Let's go ahead and rename that guy primitives, like so, and press the Return orEnter key to accept that new name, and then, very important, because we don'twant to operate on those paths, they are now selected, by the way.We no longer have the paths from the vector mask selected.we have the paths here inside the Paths panel selected.They look the same because they're identical, but we need to make sure to goback to the vector mask.

So, click on it in order to make it active again.Then go back to the Layers panel and confirm that it has a double outline aroundit, so we're operating on the right thing.Now, I want to go ahead and select all of these path outlines here.The easiest way to do that is, armed with your Black Arrow tool, go ahead andmarquee around them to some extent.Don't do that, don't grab the ellipse and drag it to a different location.That is not the easiest approach.Press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac if you did that horrible thing.Instead, I'll start here in an empty area where there is no path outline, andI'll drag down like so to make sure that I'm at least partially includingeverybody in this marquee. Then I'll release.

They all become selected now.I have all the path outlines selected.Again, you want to make sure you're selecting the paths with the Black Arrowtool, and then go up to the Combine button and click on it and you have nowcombined those paths into a single, more complicated shape outline.Notice that we have one path outline now represented here inside the vector mask thumbnail.That's very important.Go back to the Paths panel, and you'll see that the vector mask has been simplified.So, it's been resolved to a single path outline, and the primitives are stillbacked up, ready and waiting in case we need to come back to them.

All right, I'm going to return to the Layers panel.All we have left now, or at least all we have left to roughen, is this metallicportion of the light bulb.And I'm going to show you how that works in the next exercise.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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